LITMIR.BIZ

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the room at his workstation, fingers flying across a laptop while monitoring a sat com link, Akira Tokaido bobbed his head in time to the music coming from a single earbud. The lean, compact hacker was the youngest member of Stony Man’s cybernetics team and the heir apparent to Kurtzman himself. The Japanese-American cyberpunk had at times worked virtual magic when Price had needed him to.

      Across the room from Tokaido sat his polar opposite. Professor Huntington Wethers had come to the Stony Man operations from his position on the teaching faculty of UC Berkeley. The tall, distinguished black man sported gray hair at his temples and an unflappable manner. He currently worked two laptop screens as a translation program fed him information from monitored radio traffic coming out of France.

      Carmen Delahunt walked through the door of Computer Room and made a beeline for Barbara Price. The only female on the Farm’s cyberteam, Delahunt served as a pivotal balance between Tokaido’s hotshot hacking magic and Wethers’s more restrained, academic style.

      Delahunt finished her conversation and snapped her cell phone shut as she walked up to Price. She pointed toward the newspaper in the mission controller’s hand.

      “You see that about Sincanaros?” she asked. “As soon as I saw that name, it rang a bell. I ran a profile—not pretty.”

      Price smiled. “You read my mind, Carmen,” she said. “Once we have Phoenix and Able taken care of, why don’t you send me a summary in case anything comes of it.”

      “Will do.” Delahunt nodded. “I have to double-check the Mediterranean arrangements we made for Phoenix’s extraction with the ‘package.’ It’s nice to be able to tap the resources of larger groups like the Agency, but coordination is a nightmare.”

      “Let me know if anything goes wrong,” Price said.

      Delahunt nodded, then turned and began to walk back across the floor toward the connecting door to the Annex’s Communications center, her fingers punching out a number on her encrypted cell phone.

      Price smiled.

      She could feel the energy, the sense of purpose that permeated the room, flow into her. Out there in the cold, eight men on two teams were about to enter into danger for the sake of their country. If they got into trouble, if they needed anything, they would turn to her and her people.

      She did not intend to let them down.

      She made her way to a nearby desk where a light flashing on the desktop phone let her know a call was holding. She looked over at Kurtzman and saw the man returning a telephone handset to its cradle. He pointed toward her.

      “It’s Hal on line one,” he said.

      “Thanks, Aaron,” she answered.

      She set her coffee and paper down and picked up the handset. She put the phone to her ear.

      “Hal, it’s Barb,” she said.

      “I’m holding for the President on the other line,” Brognola said from his Justice Department office. “Are the men up and rolling?”

      “As we speak,” Price answered. “Tell him both operations are prepped to launch.”

      “All right. Let’s hope this one goes by the numbers,” the gruff federal agent said.

      “As always,” she agreed, and hung up.

      “All right, people,” she announced to the room. “Let’s roll.”

       CHAPTER ONE

       Lost Parish, New Orleans, Louisiana

      The men hung from chains.

      Gabriel Gonzales turned his blindfolded head and spit blood from his mouth. His lips were swollen and his teeth loose from where the Zetas gunmen had smashed a rifle butt into his face. His nose had been broken, so the act of spitting left him breathless. He quickly sucked in air, trying not to choke on blood. The air was stale and tinged with the harsh chemical smell of spilled oil.

      His arms screamed in their sockets, and Gonzales pushed his toes against the concrete floor beneath his feet to give them some relief. Around him he heard the moans and shuffling of the two other men hanging next to him. He didn’t know who they were, as they had already been bound and blindfolded in the back of the Lincoln Navigator SUV when he’d been picked up.

       Let them have gotten my call, he prayed silently.

      The sound of vibrating corrugated metal reached him as a door slammed. The noise echoed in hollow tones and Gonzales realized he had to be inside a large structure, such as an abandoned factory or, more probably, an empty warehouse. He heard the sounds of boot soles striking the floor as a group of men muttering low in Spanish moved closer.

      He heard Lagos and his heart sank. The man was speaking rapidly, and after a moment Gonzales realized he had to be on his cell phone because he was talking to his mysterious patron, the Frenchman “Henri.”

       This is going to hurt, he realized, and felt hopeless tears well up in his eyes behind the filthy cloth that covered them. When Lagos got off the phone with Henri, violent things always followed. There was a snap of hard plastic as a cell phone was shut. A snarling baritone growled an order and suddenly the blindfold was ripped from his eyes.

      Powerful headlights snapped on, burning into his eyes and keeping him blinded. Gonzales tried to turn his head away from the painful, high-intensity beams. He didn’t need his eyes to recognize the voice in command: Lagos was here and Gabriel Gonzales realized he was going to die. There was no doubt anymore, he was a dead man. All that remained was the suffering.

      J ACK G RIMALDI BANKED the Hughes 500MD Scout Defender hard in the darkness. The helicopter settled down into a hover some ten feet above the dark ground. All around the veteran pilot the devastation of Hurricane Katrina spread in a broken tableau of ruin and debris years after the storm had struck.

      Behind him acres of swamp stretched toward the tide tables nestled against the sea, while in front of him mud-caked rubble in geometrically spaced piles marked where houses and stores had once stood along roads. It looked like a war zone, even in the yellow moonlight, a ghostly boneyard of destruction and destroyed lives.

      Reconstruction had passed this Parish by. The residents had been too poor, the neighborhood too peripheral to the campaign aspirations of politicians. This was an area the hurricane could keep as New Orleans fought its way back from the devastation.

      But power abhorred a vacuum. The Zetas—former members of the army who had gone over to the dark side—had come to claim the forgotten place for themselves. The hard-core drug smugglers had found little in the way of opposition when they had first arrived. All of that was about to change.

      The three men of Able Team leaped from the hovering helicopter and entered the stifling heat of the Louisiana night.

      L AGOS SNATCHED G ONZALES by the hair and twisted his face around. Ignoring the pain, Gonzales stared dully into the eyes of the former Mexican army special-operations soldier. The eyes stared back at him, black and empty like the dull, lifeless eyes of a shark. Devoid of emotion. What was happening was just business.

      Lagos leaned in close to the sweating Gonzales and behind him the bound man could see the hulking forms of Lagos’s men, all of them wearing balaclava hoods and holding weapons. Gonzales rolled his eyes around to try to get a better look at the men hanging with him, but Lagos held him firmly. His breath smelled like cigarette smoke.

      “Was it you?” Lagos whispered. “Did you betray us?”

      “No, I swear—” Gonzales began lying.

      Lagos released his hold on the hanging man’s hair and stepped back. He lifted his arm and backhanded Gonzales across the face, cutting off his protests. Lagos was a powerful man fuelled by a daily cocaine habit. The blow hurt.

      Gonzales’s head rocked back and he winced at the sudden, stinging pain. He stumbled backward,

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